Václav Havel Library Notebooks 2009/1
March 11, 2009
The first issue of the Václav Havel Library Notebooks quarterly was published on 11th March 2009.
It contains a catalogue for the recent exhibition “We had Underground and now we have Zilch”, texts of Czech Underground poets, who in one way or another engaged with Václav Havel, photographs by Bohdan Holomíček, and Martin C. Putna’s Preface, in which, among other things, he writes: “ The concrete historic Underground ended. However, every time and every culture needs its Underground - its community of people who live, think and create “differently”, for the majority of society incomprehensibly, provocatively, impiously and thus question the “obvious” values of a given time and culture. The “Underground” of their time and environment includes the first Christians in the Roman Empire, Yurodivy in Byzantium, the companions of St. Francis in Umbria, Jewish Chasids, cursed poets in Paris and beatniks in San Francisco. Underground is the spiritual insurance of every era not to be choked in fat.”
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Speech to Joint Session of the United States Congress, Washington
„We are still a long way from that „family of man;“ in fact, we seem to be receding from the ideal rather than drawing closer to it. Interests of all kinds: personal, selfish, state, national, group and, if you like, company interests still considerably outweigh genuinely common and global interests. We are still under the sway of the destructive and thoroughly vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation, and not just a part of it, and that therefore everything is permitted. There are still many who say they are concerdend not for themselves but for the cause, while they are demonstrably out for themselves and not for the cause at all. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us, and its environment. We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic and cultural conflicts in the world. From time to time we say that the anonymous megamachinery we have created for ourselves no longer serves us but rather has enslaved us, yet we still fail to do anything about it.“
Václav Havel:
Speech to Joint Session of the United States Congress, Washington
February 21, 1990
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